Our Favorite World of Warcraft Memories

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Looking back at 10 years of ganks, epic loot, and achievements.

By IGN Staff

World of Warcraft's next expansion, Warlords of Draenor was revealed at BlizzCon this weekend and we got the chance to go hands-on with the expansion at the show. With Level 100 on the horizon, a few of us at IGN wanted to take a stroll down memory lane to relive some of our favorite moments adventuring through Azeroth. Hop on your Netherdrake and take a look.

I remember when Zul’Gurub was first added to the game, and I set eyes on the Swift Razzashi Raptor for the first time. As a member of the Alliance, the notion of riding my very own dinosaur was too exciting. The fact it was green only made things better. Sadly, despite months of raiding ZG and returning to it frequently after the level cap was raised, I never saw it drop, let alone got a chance to roll on it. Finally, when Cataclysm rolled around, it was announced ZG was to be removed from the game. As a last ditch attempt I decided to go through the instance the day before it vanished forever, to see if I could get lucky. The only person I could find to accompany on my quest was a compulsive liar from my guild. He played a Warrior and was about 14. Within five minutes of grouping with him I was questioning how wise this decision was. As it turns out? Very. We made swift progress through the instance and took down the relevant boss… only to see the raptor mount drop. I can’t quite put into words the emotions I felt: elation at seeing it drop, disbelief that it had happened at the last possible moment, fear that I could lose to that jerk Warrior… thankfully, it was over in a flash. I won the mount and have sat proudly astride it ever since.

Leah B. Jackson, Epic Raider

Is there anything cooler than seeing an epic boss for the first time? Well, yeah. Killing it. My proudest WoW moments generally revolve around taking down bosses, especially the big ones towards the end of an expansion. Getting Archimonde down in Hyjal Summit in Burning Crusade and killing Arthas in WotLK were both incredibly satisfying after chipping away at them for months. Even killing Lei Shen ahead of the curve recently was a huge accomplishment, and one I'm especially pleased with since I did it with my closest group of friends. I'm still amazed that after playing World of Warcraft for almost nine years now that every time I kill a hard boss I get the same feeling of exhilaration. As long as that loot keeps dropping, I'll be in the raid ready to go.

Mark Ryan Sallee, Victim

Flying to Washington state to spend time with friends I hadn't seen in years. The friend I stayed with just played WoW the whole time.

It's tough to pick the most memorable moment from my World of Warcraft, but the one that instantly comes to mind is from Burning Crusade. It was 2AM on a Thursday night and like other caffeine-infused college aged gamers, I was sitting in Shattrath doing absolutely nothing. I was just about to log off for the night when suddenly general chat started buzzing: Azuregos, a randomly spawning world boss, had appeared in Azshara and evidently the Horde was already en route with a raid group to take her down. Now, I don't know how it works nowadays, but back then if your opposition was trying to kill a raid boss you were obligated to try and wipe them in any way possible. So, I jumped into a small raid group with randoms and headed out there to ruin the Horde's night.

The Horde had a full raid group, and we knew we'd never be able to wipe them in a straight up fight. We had to be clever. Azuregos has this ability where every once in a while she teleports the entire raid right to her and in doing so wipes the aggro table for everyone she teleported. The raid has to make sure they're within the teleport range and not attacking after being teleported so that the tank can re-gain aggro. It was this tactic that we decided to exploit. Ten seconds before Azuregos was going to teleport the raid, my raid (we'd been hiding in the forest) descended upon the Horde raid doing our best to distract their DPS while our most geared out hunter ran right by the Horde tank. He jumped off the enormous cliff behind Azuregos, dismounted, and used distracting shot on the dragon, temporarily drawing aggro off the Horde tank and causing the dragon to come running after him as he plummeted to his death.

Right at that second, Azuregos teleported the entire Horde raid to her and all forty of them fell thousands of feet to their death. It was the most glorious wipe I've ever seen, and well worth my repair bill.

Justin Davis, Dial-Up Modem Master

In 2004 I wanted to play in the World of Warcraft beta so badly that I tried to download the multi-gigabyte game client... using my dial-up internet connection. At the time it was all I had access to. After over 24 hours of downloading at 3-5 kB per second I eventually did the math and figured out it would be faster for a friend to download the game, split it up into multiple .rar files, burn them to discs, and then send those discs to me in the mail for me to reassemble.

So that's exactly what I did.

It was worth it. Using my dial-up connection I miraculously experienced minimal lag blasting away at the starter zone's wolves, kobolds and troggs. It was the first MMO I'd ever spent much time with, and of course I immediately committed the ultimate rookie mistake of wandering into a neighboring high-level zone only to immediately aggro a random mob that one-shot me without breaking a sweat. It didn't phase me - I was hooked. All I had to do was be sure to avoid any of the major cities or quest hubs. Not because my computer couldn't handle them, but because my poor 56K modem couldn't handle all the other players running around. Don't worry - my family switched to DSL not long after.

My favorite memory in WoW was long before I traveled across the stars into Outland, before the gates of Ahn'Qiraj, and even before Battlegrounds were added to the game. It was a time where World PVP was dominant on my server, and a few of us ruthless Horde rogues made a cross-continent tour of destroying every Alliance town, camp, settlement, and player in sight. We managed to start from Stranglethorn Vale and travel all the way up to the Plaguelands, leaving a trail of Alliance corpses in our wake. We didn't exactly have a goal in mind (other than pissing off the Alliance on our server!), but it turned into something far more memorable and exciting. Once we hit Tarren Mill, there was a raid of 30-something Alliance waiting for us. And we were ready.

And there you have it! Now that you've heard our memories, be sure to share yours in the comments. We'd love to hear about your thrilling loot drops, meeting with friends, epic raid achievements, getting that sweet mount you were trying to get forever, and everything else.